Stabilizing region in dominant pole placement based discrete time PID control of delayed lead processes using random sampling

Abstract

Handling time delays in industrial process control is a major challenge in the dominant pole placement based design of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers due to variable number of zeros and poles which may arise from the Pade approximation of the exponential delay terms in the characteristic polynomials used for stability analysis. This paper proposes a new concept for designing PID controllers with a derivative filter using dominant pole placement method mapped onto the discrete time domain with a suitable choice of the sampling time to convert the continuous time time-delays into finite number of discrete time poles. Here, the continuous-time plant and the filtered PID controller have been discretized using the pole-zero matching method for handling linear dynamical systems, represented by the first order plus time delay with zero (FOPTDZ) transfer function models of the open-loop system under control. We use a swarm intelligence based global optimization method as a sampler to discover the approximate the pattern of the stabilizable region in the controller parameter as well as the design specification space while also satisfying the analytical conditions for pole placement given as higher order polynomials. Simulations on test-bench plants with open-loop stable, unstable, integrating, low-pass, high-pass characteristics have been presented in order to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed control design method.